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lomonaaeren*
“Hey, freak—”
“Leave me alone, or I’ll turn your blood to molten lead.”
Those words to Dudley had made Uncle Vernon punish Harry by shutting him up in his bedroom and locking all the locks, but at least it meant that he didn’t have to deal with chores or Dudley. Harry had managed to save his books on the blood arts and sneak them upstairs with him; he’d learned a charm before they left Hogwarts that would shrink them for twenty-four hours.
When the charm wore off, he read them obsessively, and kept his eyes on the sky. Neither Ron nor Hermione had written to him so far. Harry accepted that, in a way that would have been harder for him to achieve if Nott and Zabini weren’t writing to him.
They didn’t do it often. There would be nothing for five days, and then a flurry of owls, or a larger black bird that appeared to belong to Nott, carrying a whole package of letters. Harry read them hungrily, sprawled back on the bed with the books and other letters spread around him.
Potter, the Daily Prophet is claiming you’re a nutter…
No one in the Ministry wants to believe the Dark Lord nearly returned.
You’re being accused of Cedric Diggory’s murder.
If my father whispers to me one more time about the glory of serving the Dark Lord, I’m going to turn his blood to water.
Harry wrote back to that last letter by Nott with a more personal touch than he usually used for his replies, because, after all, what was there to interest two pureblood allies in the inner workings of a Muggle house? But Harry couldn’t let Nott think he was alone and do something stupid out of desperation.
I threatened my Muggle cousin with turning his blood to molten lead. Sort of stupid and it got me locked up, but at least he’s staying away from me.
Nott wrote back only a day later, asking why Harry got locked up. So Harry talked a little about the Dursleys and his room, and Nott sent a list of spells that Harry could use on his cousin if he could make them work with wandless magic.
Harry didn’t think he could, and he had no wish to get expelled for using magic on a Muggle even if that Muggle knew about magic, but it whiled away some time to practice the wand movements with his hand and daydream about the end of summer.
*
“We heard there was going to be an attempt on your life.”
No word about what that was. No explanation for why he’d been left in the Dursleys’ house until after his birthday and then snatched up. No explanation for why Ron and Hermione got to live in the same house as his godfather while Harry starved with his relatives.
Of course, there was an attempt at an explanation as to why Ron and Hermione hadn’t written him any letters. But Harry didn’t actually consider “Dumbledore said there was some kind of unspecified danger” to be much of an explanation. After all, Nott and Zabini had been writing to him for weeks without any poisons or Portkeys or even bubotuber pus showing up.
He didn’t snap at them too badly. Harry considered that he’d moved beyond his first friends in some ways. They had never attempted to discuss the blood arts he’d used on the Hungarian Horntail past the first few weeks after they’d seen him use it. Harry thought that Ron and Hermione wanted to ignore the evidence that he’d turned into a different person, or assumed he’d given up on the magic because he didn’t practice it in front of them.
Sirius was…another matter.
He had a shouting match with Harry the first night Harry was in Grimmauld Place over Harry saying something casually about “the awful Muggles.” Apparently he thought that meant Harry had turned into a Muggle-hater. Harry had tried to explain he was just a Dursley-hater, and Sirius had turned into a dog and run out of the room.
It never got much better from there. Sirius was simply determined to misunderstand anything about Harry that was not wholly “good” and Gryffindor.
Nott and Zabini continued writing to him; their owls were more than smart enough to find Harry when he was alone. Harry spent a lot of time in the attic of Grimmauld Place, where there was a window the owls could come through, practicing wand movements with his hand, writing, daydreaming about blood arts, or watching the sky for owls.
*
“The new Defense professor seems to have it in for you.”
Harry studied Zabini. Zabini had written to him this summer, but not as much as Nott, and now he was thinner and quieter than Harry remembered his being at the end of last year. This was the first he’d sounded like himself in days, slouched over at the end of their private table deep in the library with his eyes fixed on Harry.
“They always do.”
“Yeah. Crouch…”
Zabini flinched and turned his head, staring at the shelves. Harry had learned some tact, as Nott would put it, from his two Slytherins, but he didn’t see any reason to let Zabini brood in silence when he could at least ask.
“What happened to you this summer?”
Zabini turned to face Harry. He licked his lips and spent a moment smoothing down his robes. Harry waited. He recognized the tells of someone who wanted to talk, after spending nearly a month in a house full of people dying to justify themselves to him.
“I found out my mother was like Crouch Senior,” Zabini whispered.
Harry blinked. He’d heard the rumors that Zabini’s mother was a murderer, but they’d never included anything about her keeping people prisoner. Except with sex appeal or something. “What do you mean?”
Zabini closed his eyes tightly. Nott came around the corner with a silent step, but he only nodded when he saw Harry and Zabini and sat down next to Harry, leaning back so that their shoulders touched. That distracted Harry so much he nearly missed it when Zabini started speaking again, in a whisper.
“She was casting the Imperius Curse on me and modifying my memory. I had no idea. I just thought I never happened to see any of my stepfathers die. And a lot of them saw me as a burden or a nuisance, so I didn’t care that much. But no. I saw them die, and she was dulling my emotions and making me forget.”
“Not the Memory Charm?” Harry asked softly. Nott leaned harder into him.
“No. She thought that would damage my young growing mind, apparently.” Zabini laughed, as bitter as Sirius. “But controlling me and turning me into her puppet was apparently fine.”
And Zabini broke, leaning forwards so that his chin rested on the table and beginning to cry.
Harry stood up and moved around the table. Maybe this wasn’t his place. But he couldn’t sit here and let someone as important to him as Zabini simply cry.
He put his hands on Zabini’s shoulders, intending to just stand there and let Zabini decide how much support he wanted to accept. But Zabini whirled in his chair and grabbed Harry around the waist, bowing his head so that he was weeping into Harry’s robes.
Harry held him and said nothing. Towards the end, when Zabini’s sobs were tailing off, he looked up. Nott was watching them.
With hungry, jealous eyes.
*
“I have to learn this.”
Nott said those words when Harry found him alone in the classroom they’d turned into a practice area, one arm curled around his ribs. He had apparently vanished part of his bones instead of turning his blood to darkness.
“And we discussed that you needed to practice on something else,” Harry snapped, and cast the Shoring-Up Charm he’d heard Madam Pomfrey use several times when he was her “guest” in the hospital wing. She didn’t use it on him that often, but other students frequently came in with broken bones and inner organs that needed support, which meant Harry had heard it. And what he wanted to learn, he learned, these days. “Look, I brought a mouse.”
“A mouse? Where’d you get it?”
“Asked one of the house-elves to catch it for me.” Harry shrugged and grinned when Nott gave him an incredulous look. “One of them’s devoted to me because I freed him from the Malfoys, Nott, don’t stare at me like that.”
Nott said nothing for a moment as Harry put the mouse on the floor of the classroom, and then said abruptly, “Seems strange, you know.”
“What’s strange?” Harry asked absently, stepping back and casting a containment spell so the mouse couldn’t escape.
“That we’ve been learning blood arts together for almost a year, and you don’t address me by my first name.”
Harry cocked his head, studying Nott’s expression. It glittered like one of the knives that Harry used to cut mice when he wanted to practice blood arts himself. But he didn’t seem like he was lying.
“Just waiting for you to make the first move,” Harry said, and grinned. “If you want me to call you Theodore, I will.”
“Of course I don’t want you to call me Theodore. Theo.”
There was some kind of story there, but from Theo’s tight expression, he didn’t want Harry to ask about it. Harry ended up nodding. “Of course. I’m Harry,” and he flipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, sighing, “as all the world knows.”
Nott laughed. And then he got to practicing on the mouse.
*
“What the fuck is that, Potter?”
Harry blinked and looked up from his bleeding hand. Zabini was standing in front of him—no, wait, he’d given his permission for Harry to call him Blaise a fortnight ago. Harry sighed. The late nights in Umbridge’s detentions and probably the blood loss were messing with his memory.
“Umbridge has me using a blood quill in detentions,” he said dully.
Blaise swore loudly enough that probably other people would have come to find them, except it was after curfew and no one liked to patrol near Umbridge’s office for obvious reasons. “You didn’t tell us that.”
Harry blinked again. “I thought I had.” He knew he’d told Ron and Hermione, mostly because they hadn’t let it rest with Harry coming back from his detentions with a bleeding hand. But Hermione had just offered him Essence of Murtlap and echoed McGonagall’s advice to keep his head down, and Ron had shaken his head and muttered about how awful Umbridge was. It wasn’t like either of them had any advice.
And it was hard to think about what he might do, against Umbridge’s awfulness. Just the rumor of Voldemort coming back had apparently driven some people in Fudge’s office mad, and Umbridge had become the Defense professor and tormented Harry nightly for not admitting that he’d killed “that upstanding boy Cedric.
“You didn’t.” Blaise stared towards the closed door of Umbridge’s office. “I am going to do something about her.”
“Don’t get caught.”
“I’m a Slytherin. We don’t do getting caught. And besides, I might not be able to—”
Blaise stopped, but Harry knew what he had almost said. He patted Blaise on the shoulder with his healthy hand and said, “I know.”
Blaise walked with him part of the way back to Gryffindor Tower, departing long before they would have run into anyone who would have complained about his presence. But Harry still appreciated the thought.
And if he watched the tight muscles moving in Blaise’s back under his shirt as he walked away, that was no one’s business but Harry’s own. He was almost positive Blaise wouldn’t want to hear about it.
*
Ron and Hermione pounced on Harry the minute they got back to Gryffindor Tower after breakfast. Their Defense Against the Dark Arts classes were canceled for at least a week.
No surprise, when the professor was dead.
“Was it you, Harry?” Hermione whispered behind the Privacy Charm that she had raised immediately after she and Ron had herded Harry onto a couch. She folded her arms. “I know that she was giving you problems, but really?”
Causing me to cut my hand open night after night is just giving me problems, sure. “No, it wasn’t me,” Harry said.
“But they found her body with no blood in it!” Ron was leaning forwards, wringing his hands so hard it looked as if he might break his fingers.
“So?”
“So you used that spell on the dragon that turned her blood to darkness!”
Harry sighed and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “And that was almost a year ago, Ron. Have I done anything like that to anyone since? Dragons or professors?” Of course he had, but his Gryffindor friends didn’t know about it.
Ron and Hermione exchanged uncertain glances. Then Ron shook his head and mumbled, “No. But Dumbledore looked so upset when he was saying that Dark blood magic must have been used to kill her…”
“Either that, or a vampire got in and sucked all the blood out of her.” Harry shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“Harry! She was still a human being.”
Harry just sat back and listened to Hermione’s lecture. He would nod and mumble the right words at the right times, and she would have to let him go. It was terrible to think their relationship had deteriorated to this point, but that was the way it was. Ron and Hermione just cared too much about things that Harry didn’t give a shite about, and shied away from the things he spent his passions on.
Besides, he knew very well that Umbridge’s blood hadn’t been turned to darkness. It would have been water, which could more easily be coaxed to burst through the skin while darkness just stayed in the veins, and then someone would have set wards around her body to evaporate the water.
Someone. You know it was Blaise.
Harry was only a little jealous that he hadn’t got the kill himself, and admiring, and enormously thankful.
*
“Do I not get plaudits for killing her?”
Blaise’s voice was low, and he stood at the doorway of what had become their classroom as if he didn’t want to come in until he had got the praise he was looking for. Harry smiled and stepped towards him. “Of course you do. Thank you.”
Blaise swallowed and said nothing. Harry waited. The air between them seemed to thicken and tighten, but he wasn’t entirely sure why.
Then Blaise said, “I was thinking of—something else, in the way of plaudits.”
“Whatever you want,” Harry said softly, his heart racing with the thrill of making a reckless promise whose consequences he didn’t immediately know.
Blaise surged forwards and grabbed him. Harry went with him, enjoying the strength of Blaise’s grip on his shoulders, of the way that Blaise turned and pushed him against the shelf of books on blood arts they were accumulating. And then Blaise kissed him.
Harry gasped and opened his mouth under Blaise’s. He hadn’t really thought of this, not really, but it was the best idea anyone had ever had in the history of ideas—
And then his blood and his mouth and his cock ran away with him, and he gave up on thinking that he could stay separate.
Harry tugged on Blaise’s hair, pulling him closer. A rumble of surprised pleasure started up from Blaise’s chest, and he ran his hands through Harry’s hair, too, tugging on it and delivering whole new sparks of pleasure to Harry. Harry felt—
The door slammed open.
Harry gasped and might have jumped back from Blaise in response, but Blaise just kept his hands on Harry, as though his claim was perfectly obvious to everyone. And of course it had to be, Harry thought dazedly. When it was such a good idea.
Theo stood in the doorway, staring at them. His eyes flickered the way Harry had seen them look the day that Blaise had cried in the library about his mother cursing him with the Imperius.
Then Theo turned and all but fled the room.
Blaise said softly, “Go after him. Tell him—”
“That we can all be together?”
Blaise’s mouth dropped a little open. His eyes seemed to flicker like fires, and Harry wondered how much Blaise had thought of that, whether he would be open to that. But Harry had made his proposal, and he didn’t intend to back down. He lifted his chin and waited.
Then Blaise smiled, and the smile cut through layers of darkness Harry hadn’t known existed between them.
“Yes,” Blaise breathed. “Yes, tell him that.”
Harry squeezed Blaise’s hand—he wanted to kiss him, but he knew if he did, he would get drawn into the kiss and wouldn’t be able to go after Theo—and then turned and ran down the corridor with silent steps. He knew exactly where Theo would go.
*
Harry found Theo sitting in the library with his head furiously buried in a book, as usual. He sat down across from him and waited.
Theo’s shoulders grew tighter and tighter as Harry sat there. Other people might think Theo was so cold and withdrawn that he could have ignored Harry until the stars died, but they didn’t know the real Theo.
Theo finally flung the book aside and said flatly, “Look, we won’t be able to spend as much time together until I get over this jealousy. Obviously, you’ve chosen Blaise and I’ll have to live with that, but—”
“I’ve chosen both of you. And Blaise agrees.”
Theo stared at him with an even more open mouth than Blaise had had. Harry grinned. He couldn’t wait to tell them that. They would probably start bickering over who had really been calmer and who had really been more surprised.
“That’s,” Theo said, and shook his head back and forth for a moment. “Is that allowed?”
Harry laughed, full and free. It was the first time he could remember doing so since the graveyard. He reached out and caught Theo’s hand. “Who cares?” he breathed. “Studying blood arts wasn’t precisely allowed, either. We’ll make our own rules.”
And he kissed Theo, and discovered his mouth tasted warmer than Blaise’s, but not as piercing. Theo sat there in such shock that Harry wondered if he should pull away, but then Theo made a muffled noise and grabbed Harry and promptly bent him over the table.
Harry smiled against Theo’s lips, and pulled him closer.
*
Blaise stared at Theo. Theo stared at Blaise.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Will you stop circling each other like cats who don’t know which way they’re going to jump and just kiss already?”
Theo and Blaise looked at him, then at each other. Harry honestly wasn’t sure which of them reached out first. Probably Blaise, come to think of it. Theo still acted as though the idea that someone wanted him was too new and wonderful to contemplate.
But it didn’t matter, not when their mouths touched, not when their hands grew thick over each other’s skin. Harry watched them kiss, grinning, and didn’t turn away at all when Theo shot out a hand and dragged him into the kiss, too.
Kissing two people at once was an experience. So was trying to undress each other without taking their hands off faces or hair or shoulders.
Harry would still count it a success, though.
*
“I found another book on the blood arts.”
Harry blinked and glanced up. Blaise was standing over him with his eyes gleaming. Harry glanced around the library. Even though he always sat at tables near the back now and there was usually no one around to hear them, Hermione had been known to go some odd places when she was studying for OWLS.
Their new Defense professor, one of Dumbledore’s Order Aurors, was all right, but assigned a lot of homework. Harry shoved the essay aside now, though, and focused on Blaise. “How could you find them here? We were lucky to find what we did.”
Blaise closed one eye in a slow wink. “Have you never heard that those who study blood arts have the blood arts reveal themselves to them?”
Blaise was teasing, because Harry had indeed read that in one of the books he’d found during his initial study. But he hadn’t taken it seriously, or thought the author was being more than just poetic. Now he could feel his breath quickening, and he surged to his feet. “Show me,” he whispered.
Blaise led him down an aisle that ran to the border of the Restricted Section, but then turned. Harry could feel the tingling call of the book even before they came up to its shelf. He reached his hand out, and—
One of the books that seemed to be just a dry history tome on the goblin wars wriggled and transformed.
Harry opened it slowly, reverently. The table of contents made his eyes bug out of his head, and he looked up at Blaise.
“We can turn blood into things other than darkness or water or lead,” he whispered.
“Thought you’d be interested in that,” Blaise said, and only laughed when Harry backed him against the shelf to kiss him.
*
“Hey, did you ever think that since the book we found was disguised as one on the goblin wars, maybe Binns was a practitioner of the blood arts in life?”
“Harry, if you ever say anything as disgusting as that when I’m kissing you again, I’m going to walk away, and you can finish your own wank.”
*
“I think that you should start Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape, Harry.”
“Why, sir?”
But Dumbledore only turned away, shaking his head, and not meeting Harry’s eyes, the way he hadn’t all year. Harry sighed and sat back in the chair in the library at Grimmauld Place, staring up at the ceiling.
He knew that outright resistance against Dumbledore wouldn’t work. The man would only insist that Harry follow his will, and Harry would end up in a worse position than before because he’d look like he was defying Dumbledore.
Harry also wasn’t particularly inclined to obey the man who had ignored Harry being entered in the Tournament, and who would get upset if he knew what Harry had with Blaise and Theo and the blood arts, and who seemed to believe that Harry had some kind of dangerous connection to Voldemort despite Voldemort not having returned to his body.
So the only possible solution was to make Snape give up on the lessons of his own free will.
*
“Holy shit, Harry, what did you say to him?”
Harry smiled at Theo and drew him close with one hand. Blaise leaned his elbow on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry tilted his head back, breathing in Blaise’s scent. They had met in their usual classroom, and both Blaise and Theo were staring at the bloody lump on the back of Harry’s head where Snape had hurled a jar of Potions ingredients at him.
“I told him that I didn’t want to show him memories of my sex life when it would make him jealous.”
Theo choked. Blaise was the one who laughed outright and spun Harry around to face them. His fingers feathered over the bloody lump, and his expression grew distant. Harry sighed. “Please don’t go after him, Blaise.”
“Why not?”
“Because we should wait to take revenge on him until Dumbledore isn’t paying so much attention to my interactions with him anymore.”
Blaise nodded, his expression returning to normal. “All right. But only because you have a good reason and you aren’t making us foreswear revenge altogether.”
“Was Snape jealous?” Theo interrupted.
Harry snorted. “I have no idea. I just implied that he was sexually obsessed with me because he would have no other reason to want to see into my head.”
Blaise went into whoops, bending over at the waist and shaking a little. Harry reached out and traced a fond hand down his face.
“There’s probably another reason,” Theo said, his brow furrowed.
“Of course there’s another reason,” Harry said impatiently. “Maybe something to do with the life-debt that Snape apparently owed my father. But no one will tell me for sure, and Dumbledore didn’t even confirm for me why I had to learn Occlumency. So I’ll pretend to believe this until they do confirm it for me.”
Theo snickered, and tugged him closer. Harry kissed him, and leaned back enough to touch Blaise’s chest with one hand.
“I think having two people who are sexually obsessed with me is enough,” Harry said, right before Blaise tugged impatiently at his trousers and Harry yielded with a laugh, spreading his legs and letting them drag him to the floor.
*
Sex with all three of them and in any combination was amazing.
They’d learned how to both conjure and Transfigure things into beds for their abandoned classroom. There were times they rolled together in a tangle of limbs until Harry didn’t know who he was touching, who was touching him. He knew that they sucked and touched and kissed and thrust and it was enough.
Harry liked taking Blaise’s cock, sweating and shuddering and clawing at Blaise’s shoulders as Blaise rose above him, eyes wide and blood trickling from his lip as he bit it. He enjoyed riding Theo and having Theo ride him. Theo’s eyes always closed when he was about to orgasm. Harry had teased him about that enough that Theo had tried to keep them open the next time, only to curse when he just saw darkness again.
Harry liked watching them together, how Blaise touched Theo with a tenderness he never did with Harry, how Theo murmured reassurances into Blaise’s ear that made Blaise come all over himself.
Harry had half-wondered if he would be jealous of them together, but it was like jealousy was a foreign concept. There were the three of them, there were him and Blaise, Blaise and Theo, Theo and Harry. And everything worked.
Maybe it was practicing the same kind of magic together. Maybe it was growing up in situations that Harry suspected were similar, although Theo remained tight-lipped about that. But it didn’t matter.
They were melded, drawn together, held together, one when they needed to be, and two and three at other times, and lying next to his lovers and watching them breathe in the aftermath of fucking, Harry was convinced there was nothing they couldn’t do together.
They were amazing.
*
“I want to know why you stopped your Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape, Harry.”
So Dumbledore had figured it out, then. Harry supposed he shouldn’t be surprised, even if he had hoped that the Headmaster wouldn’t say anything about it until the term was over.
Harry shrugged a little and leaned back in his chair in front of the Headmaster’s desk the way he had leaned back in the one in the Grimmauld Place library. “I didn’t think they were necessary, sir.”
“They are extremely necessary.”
“Why, sir?”
Dumbledore didn’t reply, and didn’t look at him.
Harry nodded. “I suspect I might have a connection of some kind to Voldemort. It would explain the visions I had last year.” He knew Dumbledore was listening, even though his head was still turned away. “But I haven’t had any since I drove him from his body in the graveyard. Maybe I can’t dream of him if he doesn’t have a body.”
“You did not drive him from his body in the graveyard, Harry.”
Harry shrugged. “Essentially, I did, sir. I killed Wormtail, and that means that he didn’t have anyone human to care for him and do whatever was keeping him alive. I don’t think the snake could have done it.”
“You are being irreverent, Harry. A dangerous mistake when facing an enemy of Lord Voldemort’s caliber.”
Harry sighed explosively. “Has he made any moves this year, sir? Or do you not think that he’s been driven back to a wraith state, again?”
Dumbledore didn’t answer.
Harry nodded. “I don’t think that we have anything else to talk about concerning Occlumency, sir,” he said. “Of course, if you do want to look me in the eye again any time soon or answer my questions about why Voldemort is after me…” It was something he’d asked over Christmas at Grimmauld Place, and Dumbledore hadn’t even bothered to say anything.
Nor did he now. Harry stood up and walked out of the office.
*
“Harry.”
Theo’s voice was trembling. Harry opened his eyes. He’d volunteered to undergo an experiment where Blaise and Theo turned the majority of the blood in his body to mist and then turned it back again. It had taken a lot of arguing, but they needed the practice, and Harry trusted them completely and wanted to show it.
He wondered, now, as he looked down at where Theo’s hand was pointing, if they had accidentally vanished some veins or something.
But no, there was something dark and disgusting and pulsing lying on Harry’s chest. Harry recoiled on instinct. It promptly slipped off his chest in a splash of blood and landed on the floor. Harry reached out to step on it.
Blaise grabbed his shoulders. “Easy, Harry,” he whispered. “We—when we transformed the blood behind your scar, this thing came out.”
Harry shivered, his eyes locked on the object. It looked like nothing in particular, though now and then it seemed to show a shape like the lightning bolt that marked his forehead. “You think it’s whatever connects me to Voldemort?”
“I think it has to be.” Blaise leaned over Harry’s shoulder and frowned at the dark, shivering thing. “And I also think that we shouldn’t try to mess with it.”
Harry shook his head. “Obviously not.”
Blaise smiled at him a little, and Theo stepped forwards, wand aimed at the dark object. Harry nearly panicked and snapped at him before he realized Theo was putting up containment wards around the thing. It was the sort of magic they’d studied along with the blood arts to prevent any transformed blood from spreading too far or fast. Harry watched with narrowed eyes and a thudding heart as Theo wove the wards around the edges of the thing and forced the darkness back in towards what might be its center.
Theo stepped back at last with a long sigh. “I have the feeling that we’ll be doing more research now.”
Harry nodded.
*
In the end, they found the answer, or at least a possible answer, in a book on soul magic. Blaise had suggested expanding in that direction after they didn’t run into anything usable in the books on blood arts that they already had.
“After all, some people say the Killing Curse directly affects the soul,” Blaise had murmured, leaning back in his chair in the library and balancing it on its legs in a way that would have caused Madam Pince a heart attack if she’d seen him. “All the Unforgivables, actually. The Cruciatus Curse supposedly causes pain down to the soul. The Imperius Curse…” He shuddered.
Harry and Theo’s hands landed on Blaise’s shoulders at the same time.
Blaise nodded, closed his eyes, and took a moment to ride out the memories before he whispered, “Supposedly it deforms the soul, both of the caster and of the one it was cast upon.”
“The only one with a deformed soul is your mother,” Harry said.
“We’ll make her pay,” Theo said.
Blaise smiled at them. “Anyway,” he said, and leaned forwards to tap a finger against the book on soul magic, which they’d also found in a section of the library shelves that seemed to open itself only to people who had spent a certain amount of time studying certain kinds of Dark Arts, “a Horcrux sounds like it to me.”
Harry swallowed. “What are the chances that he only made one?”
Blaise and Theo stared at him. Then Theo said, “You can only make one. That’s the way it works.”
“Who says?”
“I mean…the laws of soul magic…” Blaise trailed off and stared doubtfully at the book again. “I’m sure that I saw something in here implying…” He flipped a few more pages. Harry watched him. Theo watched Harry.
Blaise looked up at last, his eyes blank. “No. I thought it was there, but what I saw doesn’t actually imply that you can only make one.”
Harry sat down and quietly, his voice trembling more than he wanted it to, told them in detail about the diary.
*
By the end of the story, Theo was standing behind Harry, hands locked on his shoulders, and Blaise was leaning across the table, one hand locked on Harry’s wrist. On his pulse, Harry thought. And Theo’s fingers were resting just a few inches from the pulse in his throat.
“No one took care of you,” Theo whispered. “You could have died before we even met you.”
“Properly,” Blaise said, but his voice lacked its usual bite. “Harry…”
“I defeated the diary,” Harry said. “And we took out—the thing.” The thing was the only way they ever referred to it, although if the book was right, Harry supposed they might have another name for it now. He nodded towards the warded vial in Theo’s robe pocket. “But there might be others out there, if there were two. Why would he give up making them when two of them might be found and destroyed?”
“If he even meant to make the one in you at all,” Blaise said softly.
“Explain that,” Theo snapped.
Blaise’s eyes were far away again. “I can believe that he went there that night intending to make one of those things. But why store it in a living being? They die, in a way that objects like the diary don’t. They’re vulnerable in a thousand ways, to aging if nothing else. No, he probably meant to kill Harry and use his death for it. But something went wrong.”
Harry clenched his hands. “I’ve tried to make Dumbledore tell me why Voldemort is after me. He won’t.”
“Then we will.’
“What?” Harry started, and not just because of how flat Blaise’s voice was.
Theo bent down and whispered into his ear, although his voice was loud enough that Blaise could hear it, too. “We’ll find out. We’ll tell you. And we’ll find out how many more of the things he made, and hunt them down, if we need to.”
Harry turned his head and rested his chin on Theo’s hand, while he clutched Blaise’s fingers. There was nothing he could say. His heart was full, and it thundered through him with the sheer pulse of blood magic.
“I truly believe,” Blaise said, as softly as Theo, “there is nothing we cannot do.”
“We will make it so,” Theo said.
Harry clutched Blaise’s hand and ground his chin down against Theo’s wrist. He couldn’t say what he meant right now. He was—
Wild with anticipation. Calm with longing. Smug with knowledge of their power.
Strong with his love for them.
Together, we can do anything. And we will.
The End.
